if you play tram or norway you wont see a shit because z far value is set to the max fog distance and no color buffer is cleared, simply the game cant erdarw the frame theer because theer is ntohing to draw there

you think about r_picmip . If set to 0 the texture will have maximum quality designed by rtcw, if greater textures will be blurred (in example if set to 9 you will see no textures just simple colors), r_picmip2 is used in sp only(character texture blur)